Shel Silverstein

            Shel Silverstein (1930-1999) will be remembered for the children’s books he wrote and illustrated, but he also had a successful career as a song writer whose songs, performed by Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and many other artists, often reached the top of the country and pop music charts.

            The children’s books have sold tens of millions of copies. In our house, Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974) was one of the most thumbed.

                        Silverstein’s poems are sly enough to please adults because they intelligently as well as playfully aim at what children like. It’s a cliché that kids like oral humor, and Silverstein serves it up big time. A sure kid’s favorite is the poem in which the narrator describes the process as he’s being eaten by a boa constrictor. ”Hungry Mungry,” the Alexander of eaters, eventually eats everything—even himself—so there is nothing left. Other poems dealing with eating include one about writing a poem from inside a lion after getting too close, “Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich,” and “Eighteen Flavors…Lying there (sniff) on the ground.”

            Kids are also fascinated with the impossible and with little tales that do not end with everyone singing “tutti contenti saremo cosí.” They like unusual critters, such as Silverstein’s wren that swishes a razor-sharp tail or the beast who feeds on poets and tea. His drawings are often as entertaining as the poems, and the drawn image sometimes mediates with the imaginative content as when the boy warns his sister he’s going to erase her, and does. Several themes come together here, too, such as the bad end for the annoying (sisters, dentists), the appeal of the impossible, the defamiliarization of the ordinary such as pencils and erasers. A mother’s warning that her child would lose his head if it weren’t attached becomes literal. We see another angle on things in “Point of View,” where we look at “dinner / From the dinner’s point of view.” Poems are written on long noses and on giraffes’ necks. “Instructions” for washing an armadillo include using “72 pads of Brillo.”

            Some of the poems are about storytelling, about tall tales or about a story’s reception. One of my favorites is “The Battle”:

                                    Would you like to hear

                                    Of the terrible night

                                    When I bravely fought the—

                                    No?

                                    All right.

A few of the poems are a couple of pages long, but some are as short as this.

            A Light in the Attic (1981) may be a better book to show how Silverstein gets into children’s heads—if indeed he needs to go beyond his own, which may not have changed since childhood. There are poems here that your parents don’t want to hear: “How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes,” “Prayer of the Selfish Child,” “Always Sprinkle Pepper in Your Hair,” and “The Nailbiter.” One of them, about the little girl who dies because she doesn’t get the pony she asks for, ends with the tip that you might want to read this one to your folks when they don’t get you something you want.

            Silverstein understands that the literal often fascinates a kid; to take a non-Silverstein example, why do the grown-ups get so exercised about a cereal killer? The baby-sitter who thinks she’s supposed to actually sit on the baby is the subject of one poem; another is about Geraldine, who shakes the cow to get her milkshake. The pet one child’s dad brings home turns out to be an aunt eater, “And now my uncle’s mad!” Are wild strawberries really wild? Do they claw or scratch?

            We hear what the carrot said (“Lettuce rest”) and what the paper said to the pen, but when we get to what the teapot said, we’re brought up short with reality: “teapots can’t talk!” There’s a very convincing tension in Silverstein’s poems between the urge to “put something silly in the world / That ain’t been there before” and the fact that teapots can’t talk. He recognizes that children always live in two worlds at once, and generally manage it better than spies or double agents.

            Looking at things upside-down or backwards has always been a characteristic of Silverstein, who wrote “A Boy Named Sue.” The boy looking down at his upside-down reflection in a pond wonders whether he’s the one upside-down in another kid’s world. Maybe my hair isn’t wavy at all, but it’s my head. There’s “Backwards Bill,” who rides his horse backward with his hat on his toe and his boot on his head. The “Strange Wind” that left my hat on blew my head away. The baby bat is scared of the light.

            Defying the happy ending, the socially acceptable, and the moral of the story are typical Silverstein moves. So here are poems about children who come to a sticky end, like “Ticklish Tom,” who’s tickled by all and sundry until he ends up on the railroad track, and now he isn’t ticklish anymore. “Clarence” sends for new parents by mail order. Other poems play on the attractiveness of the forbidden, the scary, the outrageous. The pirate is a terrible man who makes people walk the plank and maroons them on islands, but “if you invite him to dinner, / Oh, please sit him next to me!” What do I do with the 24-foot python whose body spells out for me “I love you”? It is the face that asks the questions in “Who Ordered the Broiled Face?”

            This combination of the wildly unexpected with the unnerving shows up also in the poem that asks what do I do when the signal light turns not red or green, but blue with lavender spots, or the one about the gumball machine with the eyeball among the gumballs: “You don’t need any more gum today.”

            Among the cautionary tales, my favorite is about the Whatifs that crawl into your ear when you’re trying to go to sleep. Another is about the child who is so afraid of things that he won’t try anything but stays in his room—where he drowns when the room fills up with his tears.

            Silverstein’s illustrations convey as much as the words of his poems, as in “Buckin’ Bronco,” where the poem’s speaker is only visible as his or her boots flying out of the drawing on the left, or “The Man in the Iron Pail Mask,” who is in fact a child with a wooden sword nearly completely covered by the bucket on his head, or the four-page illustration of the kids’ trip through the “quick-digesting Gink.”

            The most popular of Silverstein’s children’s books was The Giving Tree (1964). Its popularity is a puzzle to some of us. The Giving Tree works like a touchstone to reveal the hobby-horses of its adult commentators. A boy loves a tree that reciprocates by providing shade, branches to climb, and apples to eat. But the boy grows up and wants more, so she gives him apples to sell, then branches to build a house, and ultimately, her trunk to build a boat, all as the boy, now a man, ages. Finally, when the old man returns, the tree, now a stump, provides a place to sit.

            Is the story about man’s rape of nature? Is it about unconditional love? Is it about incompatibility of generations? Is it about too-indulgent parents?

            Despite the ambiguity, the book makes it on many lists of the best children’s books and has sold millions of copies. It’s a story that, like a lot of Silverstein’s poems and stories, does not end happily. And even if it’s not one of those books that the kids clamor to have read to them again and again, I can see them, when they get to the end, nodding as if to say, “Yep. That’s the way it is.”

 

 

A Startling Book of Poems in a Fine Translation

 

            My friend and one-time student Daniel Parker has sent me a translation he and his wife, YoungShil Ji, did of Jin Eun-young’s We, Day by Day (2018). It’s volume 25 in The White Pine Press Korean Voices Series.

            This book was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk prize in translation in 2019. The judges wrote that “YoungShil Ji and Daniel T. Parker have created a wonderfully supple, lasting music through their translation.” As Ji and Parker suggest in the Introduction, we have to find a new way to read these poems, quieting our rage for understanding as we go. There are progressions of images in the poems, and sometimes images—a wounded forehead, glass petals and glass flowers, the nipple of a balloon—carry over from one poem to the next. I wonder, too, with her, why “Washed clothes take so long to dry,” and about the shoe seller’s fixations with time—drunken time, a Big Ben clock, the cuckoo’s funny cries, and the wristwatch memory never wore. Eun-young drops a delightful color into nearly every stanza of her poems. She’s not merely a visual imagist poet, though; these poems are full of sounds, textures, tastes, and fragrances as well. And more than once an image as from a surrealist painting surprises: “birds soar through the hole pierced in my back” (“Before the Rooster Crows”).

            Some of these techniques may be from the surrealists’ playbook, such as the incongruous image: “the moon’s eyelashes are long.” But others are definitely not, as when she reverses time, playing the tape backward: “Like the smell of blood from a temple firing into the round muzzle of a black pistol” in “A Muffler Named Vladimir.”

            “A Day When I’m Sick and Alone” reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s attempt to capture in an essay the feeling of illness approaching delirium, in “On Being Ill.”

Eun-young makes fun of the critic’s attention to unimportant details in “To a Critic,” and suggests the critic’s pronouncements might be less than respectable: “Be sure to feel the whoosh of something whooshing through the crotch of your thin pants.” She makes a note to herself in “To Me”:

                        Burn the hardback book.

                        predict something,

                        love contingency.

The epigraphs she gleans from her readings in philosophy—Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Descartes—are also like notes to herself, especially the one by Spinoza about being careful not to mock or execrate what is, after all, merely human. And to love the human is also to love contingency. And in “Friend,” she revises Descartes’ first principle so that the presence of a friend, rather than doubt, assures us of our existence. Eun-young has a Ph.D. in philosophy, so these are not a dilettante’s interests.

            The conceit of one poem is a letter to Ludwig Wittgenstein, written by Rainer Maria Rilke and found in Rodin’s studio. The writer scornfully rejects the offer of a grant from Wittgenstein’s foundation because it’s too small. While other poets may be content to write ekphrastic poems describing a painting, Eun-young’s “Painting” is a regular mashup of the arts, as the people in two competing paintings read or recite Neruda and Eliot while playing the cello well and the piano badly.

            I don’t want to suggest all these poems are light or funny. They are not, and some evoke the lost innocence of childhood, the death of immigrants as they attempt to find a better life, and the futility of contemporary poets ever developing the power of Goethe’s Werther, that drove readers to suicide.

            These poems cannot have been easy to translate. But Parker and Ji give a sense of sureness to the images and turns of Eun-young’s lines. We are startled, we wince, we laugh, and we marvel as she surely must have intended.